The corporate IT self-service portal has to be one of the most touted IT service management (ITSM) advancements of the last decade. It was going to cure most ITSM ills, with the promise of “better, faster, cheaper” IT service delivery and support. And delivering against shift-left strategies aimed at meeting employees’ consumer-world-driven support expectations while also reducing costs for both the IT department and the wider business. More recently, the IT self-service portal has been aligned with two key, and linked, ITSM trends – enterprise service management1 and the improvement of employee experience. Extending the benefits of its use to other business functions to improve employee productivity and business outcomes. However, many IT self-service portals have failed to deliver on their promises. Thus, the premise of this paper – that the IT self-service portal is dead or “slowly dying on the vine” – is based on historical and more recent data that points to the issues with employee adoption levels and the associated employee experience. That, despite the big ambitions, the delivery of IT self-service portals has failed in execution. Such that, while organizations might be continuing to invest in the improvement of their IT self-service portal, the changing service and support landscape and associated technology innovations – in particular, smart technologies – will eventually make the traditional portal redundant. However, this doesn’t mean that the need for self-service capabilities is dead. It’s simply evolving based both on employee ways of working and the introduction of new smart technologies.
